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139 Bryan Cuevas's Article Deals with Death in Tibetan Buddhist Popular BOOK REVIEWS 139 Bryan Cuevas’s article deals with death in Tibetan Buddhist popular literature by working from the biography of an ordinary seventeenth-century laywoman, Karma Wangzin, who journeyed to hell and back again. John Holt’s article “The Dead Among the Living in Contemporary Buddhist Sri Lanka” discusses the activities of a village lay priestess who helps the living communicate with the recently deceased; he argues this type of Sinhala lay religiosity is not new but has ancient roots. Matthew Kapstein’s study of Mulian and Gesar examines how the Chinese tale of the Buddha’s disciple Mulian (Maudgalyåyana), who descended to hell to save his mother, was rendered into a Tibetan context and associated with the culture hero Gesar. Although no Chinese-style “ghost festival” was ever practiced in Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism still contained a great deal of filial piety which influenced the mythos of Gesar. A final cluster of articles deals with the biological end of life. Since the dead and their disposal are a physical process in a society, Buddhism has been greatly concerned with the practical matters of funerary and mortuary rites. Hank Glassman’s article on “Chinese Buddhist Death Ritual and the Transformation of Japanese Kinship” argues that Heian Buddhist funerary and mortuary practices evidence a shift to the patriarchially-oriented family grave and memorial system which dominated later Japanese society. Mark Rowe’s article on “Scattering Ashes in Contemporary Japan” surveys the current movement away from the traditional Buddhist monopoly on family-oriented death ritual which is being expressed in innovative practices of scattering ashes or creating voluntary burial societies. Jason Carbine’s article on “A Monk’s Final Journey” describes how the death of the twentieth-century Burmese monk Bhaddanta Indåcåra in 1993 has become an exemplary reference event for the care of the monastic dead in that Theravåda tradition today. In summary, this volume presents research of the highest class by a set of the best scholars working in English in Buddhist studies. The editing is excellent; and besides supplying extensive bibliography for each article, the book includes Chinese and Japanese character glossaries and an index. Scholars of both Buddhism in general and of regional/national practices will need to turn to this collection for its up-to- date findings about the variety and importance of this fatally essential dimension of the religion. Galen Amstutz Ryukoku University Nam-lin Hur Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, 550 pages. Every student of Japan knows that during the Tokugawa period every resident of Japan was required to become a member of some Buddhist temple as part of a national bakufu policy. In spite of the apparent importance of this phenomenon, it has not been given much detailed or critical attention by foreign scholars, which 140 JAPANESE RELIGIONS 33 (1 & 2) is in accordance with a relatively weak interest in Tokugawa Buddhism outside of Japan. However, a synthetic understanding of the Tokugawa system is not easily accessible. As the author Nam-lin Hur notes with accuracy (p. 29), there are great accumulations of research work on the Tokugawa danka system in Japanese, but “it is extremely hard to combine them into a coherent whole because they are heavily compartmentalized, fragmented, narrowly specialized along disciplinary lines, and/or scattered throughout innumerable local case studies.” This lengthy new work brings out a wealth of information hitherto not available in English and greatly advances awareness of the subject. At the same time, some serious questions have to be raised about the book’s viewpoint. First, however, Hur’s story deserves a good summary. The work is composed of an introduction, fourteen chapters, and a conclusion, in all covering a wide variety of topics. The introduction poses the central question: in Tokugawa Japan “officialized” Buddhist temples were everywhere, because of a huge expansion in the numbers of temples in the early decades of the seventeenth century, yet they were not supported by any direct economic policies and expenditures of the Tokugawa regime. Why and how did this situation develop? The answer is the danna system, the obligatory link between temples and death practices which was established by the Tokugawa regime’s universal requirement of membership in a Buddhist temple for all individuals. What this linkage really represented was preexisting customary religious affiliation (at least at some places in Japan) which was opportunistically turned into a universal anti- Christian policy by the bakufu. In the end, the author claims, it had the effect of “subjugating” the whole population to Buddhism. Chapter 1 surveys the origin of the danka system against the background of trade, anti-Christianity and Buddhism in the years 1600-1632. As the anti-Christian crackdown progressed, from about the year 1614 it became the local, ad hoc practice for policing authorities to use proofs of affiliation with a local Buddhist temple as a way for residents to avoid being identified as Kirishitan and persecuted by the samurai. (p. 49) At the early stage, there was no sign that this restricted device would turn into a countrywide strategy; in fact the bakufu had no apparent interest in doing anything at all that would strengthen Buddhist institutions. However, after the so- called Purple Robe Incident of 1627-1629, the bakufu pivoted and began to order Buddhist temple networks to reorganize in a head-and-branch (honmatsu) system, and from 1631 the various head temples were supposed to submit registers of their members to the government. Chapter 2 surveys how the ad hoc police interests in local Buddhist affiliations in the early part of the seventeenth century turned into “Buddhist inspection” between 1633 and 1651 after the start of the Iemitsu administration. Iemitsu’s policy was to ratchet up the pressure and terrorism against Kirishitan, and from about 1634, in Nagasaki, his officials began to use temple membership more and more systematically to try to track down Christian elements; other southern domains began to follow suit in using this method. (Nevertheless, for decades there were many areas quite lacking any Buddhist temples with which local people could affiliate in accordance with this rule.) Then, however, the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-1638 utterly radicalized the bakufu regime BOOK REVIEWS 141 against the Kirishitan. From 1638 the regime made national an informers’ program against Kirishitan (to be paid for by with bakufu funds, quite irregular in the Tokugawa system) and from this point began to expect – in theory – the implementation of universal annual temple certification across Japan with a standard format. Even then though there was little immediate activation. Some Buddhist monks around this time – among them Suzuki ShØsan and SessØ Sosai – operating in certain areas such as Nagasaki combined Buddhist preaching with anti-Kirishitan messages, yet the bakufu still did not develop any confidence that the Buddhists’ interests really coincided with those of the bakufu. Only a bit later, during the 1640s, Inoue Masashige (1585-1661), an official involved in the anti-Kirishitan campaign who had been appointed to a new bakufu post in 1640 (later Inspector of Religions, sh¨mon aratame-yaku), came to the consistent conclusion that the practice of surveillance via temple certification was the best practical policing option to suppress the stubborn Kirishitan. Chapter 3 then describes how the surveillance system was implemented and extended between 1651 and 1709, beginning with the regime of Ietsuna. Faced with continuing evidence of diehard Kirishitan persistence, the regime further increased its administrative and legal efforts to detect them, including a nationwide network of religious superintendents (sh¨mon bugyØ) whose key assignment was the pursuit of Christian followers. (Again, Hur emphasizes that this kind of direct bakufu intervention into local government matters was highly irregular in the system and was based in overriding motivations of national security.) As it turned out, the new government policy of universal required membership was like a mass of windfall contracts for Buddhist temples and provided the institutions with huge, new, mostly unearned economic opportunities. In some places, the advent of this unprecedented requirement for people to be affiliated with temples gave Buddhist priests a chance to coerce locals in regard to membership. Otherwise, Buddhist sects sometimes competed sharply with each other to sign up members voluntarily. There were problem cases; the bakufu itself recognized certain abuses as early as the 1660s. In three particular domains (Mito, Okayama, Aizu), the daimyo greatly disliked the windfall advantages and authority which the Tokugawa policy had inadvertently given to the temples in their domains, and in response Mito introduced its own heavy-handed temple control policies and Okayama tried to replace temple certification with a kind of substitute Shinto shrine certification. The whole certification project was characterized by a fundamental time lag. By the 1660s Kirishitan had already been almost completely successfully wiped out in fact, but bureaucratic inertia guaranteed that impetus for the temple registration system would continue past the date when its original usefulness had essentially vanished. The bureaucratic
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